More "miscellany" (General)

by David Turell @, Friday, August 26, 2022, 00:31 (581 days ago) @ dhw

Vocalisation

DAVID: Once again you are asking for God to set up secondhand design.

dhw: I keep answering this, so I will repeat yesterday’s discussion below, since you totally missed the point. You understandably gloss over your own theories, which “make sense only to God”, and yet you reject theories which you agree do offer logical explanations of life’s history, even in tandem with some of the ideas you can’t explain. Would you at least agree that if God WANTED a free-for-all (with the option of dabbling if he felt like it), he was perfectly capable of giving cells/cell communities the autonomous intelligence to design their own means of survival?

Design is too complex for cells to do it!!!


dhw: We have dealt with this [second hand design] before. When comparing yourself to God, you told us you had your plan when you wanted to design something, and of course it was more efficient for you to do your own designing. And I suggest that if your God’s only plan had been to design H. sapiens plus food, it would have been more efficient for him to mimic you and do it directly. But he didn’t. Unlike you, instead of directly designing the only things he wanted to design, he apparently fiddled around with countless life forms and foods – most of which had no connection with us and our foods – and then with one stage after another (the evolution of humans), designing some bits that were useful, discarding other bits that weren’t, until at long last he came up with the goods: you and me and our food.

DAVID: Simply a weak criticism of God's method of evolution to create us.

dhw: It is not a criticism of God! It is a criticism of your theory that his one and only purpose was to create us and our food! The history of life does not reveal the single-minded pursuit of a single purpose which characterized your own form of design and made direct action the most efficient way of achieving your goal.

Exactly! Only direct design by God works. Ask IDer's


Antifreeze

DAVID: At least scientists can actually calculate the odds against finding the right protein. It ain't a piece of cake.

dhw: So what are the odds against the existence of an invisible, unknown, unknowable, sourceless mind which creates universes? That ain’t a piece of cake either.

DAVID: But a mind had to do it.

dhw: Did minds evolve from matter, or did matter evolve from a mind? I’m stuck on 50/50.

DAVID: We came from pure inorganic matter long before any mental matter arrived.

dhw: If by “we” you mean forms of life, your statement would support the materialistic theory that inorganic matter underwent endless combinations before finally producing life and rudimentary mental matter which evolved into varying degrees of consciousness. No need for God. Just a bit of luck in the course of eternity!

DAVID: Just because I don't mention God above as understood to being in action, I do now. Materialism is atheism.

dhw: Of course it is. And your statement can be used in support of atheism.

Only if God is not understood to playing the design role.


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